


Coping Strategies

by idelthoughts



Series: Tumblr Ask Box Fic [5]
Category: Forever (TV)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Gen, Grief/Mourning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-15
Updated: 2015-03-15
Packaged: 2018-03-18 00:27:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 914
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3549236
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/idelthoughts/pseuds/idelthoughts
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The apartment was far too quiet these days, and sober nights at home were a special hell all their own.  In the years after Abe's death, Henry's coping strategies become more destructive.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Coping Strategies

**Author's Note:**

> From the tumblr prompt: _Henry Morgan thinks he has given up opiates and drinking to excess, but at some point in the next two millennia, he'll spend a full century in a drugged or drunken haze._

Henry kept it together relatively well for a few years after Abe died.  He liked to think so, anyway.  He was closer to Jo for a time afterward, she taking pity on him and spending time with him, evenings of talking and visiting with him before she went back to her home and he was alone.  
  
He started drinking around then.  At first it had been a half-hearted project to knock through the bottles of wine he and Abe had stashed away for pleasant summer evenings on the patio, starting with the fine merlots and pino grigios they’d picked to complement Abe’s many fantastic dishes.  Too many evenings he’d not stopped with a glass, finding that by the end of the bottle he cared much less if the house were empty.  As an added bonus, the pain of the next morning meant he did not miss his lost breakfast ritual.  He was far too concerned with keeping plain toast down to miss laden plates and Abe’s company.  
  
Once too often he’d called in sick, unable to make it to the bottom of the stairs before he felt ill, and that had tipped Jo off.  She’d checked in, all worry and concern and hovering, but he’d assured her all was well and it was just a momentary hurdle he would surmount.  He slowed down a bit, as by then the wine was done, but he avoided Jo all the same.  He knew it hurt her, but she knew him too well—it was too difficult to see the recognition in her eyes.  
  
For a while he tried, but sober nights at home were a special hell all their own.  
  
He’d had a fondness for whiskey once upon a time, and so, like a good collector, he set about finding his favourite vintages.  He had money to burn at auctions and good distilleries for mail-order bottles.  A lush he might be, but at least his vice was distinguished.  But some sort of frugal sense mixed with the excess, and the odd case of middle range whiskey would arrive with the rest, to balance out the cream.  
  
He made it a year before Lieutenant Reece knocked on his door one night.  He thought he was able to speak to her with a relatively sober mien, but from the immediate look on her face he could tell that was wishful thinking rather than reality.  
  
“Doctor, this is becoming a problem,” she said, crossing her legs and leaning back in the armchair.  “I don’t want to see one of my best people gone because of a personal issue, but when it comes to work with you, I have to draw a line.”  
  
Henry sat on the couch opposite her, staring at his feet in sullen silence.  He felt like a child being lectured.  
  
 _Him_ , a man of centuries, being brought low by a woman a mere fraction his age, with a bare understanding of the world around her, of the man in front of her.  As if she could understand the fear he had to keep at bay each day to just to stay his line, the loneliness of this godforsaken apartment he stayed in because it was all he had left of Abe, as though she could _understand_ —  
  
That’s when he realized he was red-faced and shouting at her, on his feet, and that he wasn’t entirely sure what he had said.  
  
“I’m sorry,” he said.  “I think you should go now.”  
  
“Henry, I’m speaking as your friend.”  Reece stood and came to him, taking his hands in hers, holding them firm and tight, her grip secure and unavoidable.  “This needs to stop.  You’re too good a man to take this road.”  
  
His guilt and shame were too deep to look at her any more, and so he asked her to leave again.  She did.  When he returned upstairs, he faced the bottle still open on his living room table, knowing he had two choices.  
  
He took the cowardly way and poured himself another three fingers of whiskey, determined to forget the memory of Joanna’s hands holding his—the first live person he’d touched in months, since he’d driven Jo away with his silence.  
  
That night, Henry drank himself to death.  
  
He burst from the water with a gasp, the icy cold shockingly sharp and clear.  For the first time in nearly two years he was sober and his mind was awake.  Habit took over and he swam for the shore, making it to sharp rocks that bit into his feet with startling clarity, his body sensitive to stimuli he’d blocked for long enough that he’d forgotten he could feel like this.  
  
But there was no one to call or come to his rescue with a towel and clothing, nothing but an impossible naked dash home, and there seemed little point in trying.  There was little point to _anything_ he was doing.  Henry sat on the rocks, put his head in his hands and cried, shivering wet and naked, still sobbing when the two uniformed police came down and urged him up, taking him in for yet another indecent exposure charge.  
  
Henry lost his job the next day.  It was almost a relief.  
  
Now he could stop this charade of a life, stop dragging himself through the trailing vestigial pieces of memory of the happy life he had with Abe, and move on to whatever came after this.    
  
As Henry packed boxes, he drank and tried to forget.    
  



End file.
